The approaches described in this section could be pursued, but are not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Some methods exist for specifically providing to a user a content in which said user may be interested, i.e. a personalized content.
One example is the one that addresses targeted advertizing by using a combination of broadcast and push delivery methods. Advert videos are pushed to the user's set-top box hard drive where a decision engine selects, versus household profiling, the most appropriate advert video and ensures its synchronization in the broadcast stream.
The document EP1667452 describes an extension of this use case and evocates the notion of a “Virtual personalized TV channel”, wherein a locally stored advert or a media content insertion/substitution is launched in response to a message sent from a service provider. Then, an advert or media content selection process is run according to different rules (user profile, advert score, media content type, time of the day, parental control) before being played out during a fixed time slot in between two other media contents. This document details a selection algorithm using several table descriptors. However, this document does not describe how to ensure seamless TV program sequencing of the different programs constituting the virtual channel.
Another example is the TVanytime (TVA) initiative which is a set of specifications, detailed in the ETSI (European Telecommunications Standards Institute) TS 102822-2, dedicated to the controlled delivery of a media content to a user's local storage device. TVanytime allows the end user to record from an Electronic Program Guide (EPG) any TV program that the user designated in order for him to watch it at a most convenient time. However, this solution presents a recurrent inaccuracy due to live events that regularly impact the initial scheduling and could give a weak user quality of experience.